This Is Anne Hathaway Now

Mar 14, 2017

Dress by Dolce & Gabbana. Earrings by David Yurman.

Terry Tsiolis

Sure, blondes might have more fun. But it’s an indisputable fact that brunettes, even the most recognizable among them, have an easier time blending in. Take Anna Hathaway: Dressed in black pats, a black sweater, and a black coat, hiding her distinctive oversize eyes behind a pair of significantly less distinctive oversize sunglasses, she's able to make her way through a packed Tribeca restaurant without turning a single head.

Of course, the illusion of anonymity only lasts so long. Once the actress, 34, takes a seat in the corner and starts shedding her layers, the surreptitious glances begin.Features like hers—the beguiling eyes, the strong brows, the mouth both wide and full-lipped—tend to attract attention. But, as glamorous as she can be, that’s not her vibe today. Instead, makeup-free, she seems downright delicate—not fragile, exactly, but fine-boned, lovely, even wholesome.

In fact, there’s only one ostentatious, starry thing about her: her long, fake, French-manicured fingernails, which she soon explains are for her role as an actress in the rapturously awaited, female-led Ocean’s Elevenspin-off, Ocean’s Eight. “Everyone says they don’t look like me,” she says. “Yesterday, at the [ELLE] shoot, my makeup artist told me it looks like alien hands have been photoshopped onto my body.”

She’s a bit tired, she says, the combined result of circumstances both professional (she’s filming at night) and personal (she has a son, Jonathan, who was born last March). But when I remind her that I’ve interviewed her twice before, she claps. “Oh, this is going to be fun,” she says, “to meet ourselves again and see how we have changed.”

We'd first talked back in 2004, shortly before the release of The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. She'd been happy enough, at 21, to be promoting the sequel to the movie that, three years earlier, had served as her (very) big break. But it was clear even then that as far as she was concerned, her princess phase was over. She was just as eager to discuss the more grown-up role of Jake Gyllenhaal’s long-suffering, rodeo-riding wife in Brokeback Mountain, which she hadn’t even shot yet.

By our second meeting, in 2007, the Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-raised daughter of an actress mother and a labor attorney father was a full-fledged movie star: She’d scored a sophisticated hit as the naïve up-and-comer in 2006’s stylish magazine-set comedy The Devil Wears Prada and was only a year away from her first Oscar nomination for her revelatory portrayal of a drug-addicted narcissist in Rachel Getting Married. But as successful as she was then—as smart and engaging as she’s always been—she still lacked the kind of self-possession that’s so instantly arresting now.

Bracelets by Bulgari. Bracelet by Chopard. Baseball Cap by '47.

TERRY TSIOLIS

It’s a shift she acknowledges even before I ask about it; when I mention that I’ve recently reread the transcripts of our past interviews, the first thing she wants to know, with her epic signature smile, is, “How hard was I trying?” And it’s true that she had seemed concerned about how she might come across. For example, 10 years ago—after a short monologue on the horrors of having been misquoted by another journalist on the topic of depression—she’d concluded,“If I could change anything, I would want to approve the copy and the pictures.”

Hearing this today, she laughs and pantomimes patting her younger self on the head.“That’s so cute. Aw. That’s really adorable. No!” More seriously, she proclaims, “I am a different human being than I was then.”

"I am a different human being than I was then."

She insists most of the credit goes to Adam Shulman, the actor/producer/jewelry designer whom she began dating in the fall of 2008 and married in September 2012.“He changed my ability to be in the world comfortably,” she says. “I think the accepted narrative now is that we, as women, don’t need anybody. But I need my husband. His unique and specific love has changed me.”

Emily Blunt—a close friend of Hathaway’s ever since she played Prada’s perspicacious first assistant to Hathaway’s earnest second—says that her partnering up with Shulman “has been Annie’s greatest achievement in many ways. He’s sort of home away from the storm of fame that she lives with.” Blunt continues, “Being with the right person has been a major part of her growth, but I don’t think she cares as much anymore.That’s something both of us feel now: Who fucking cares? You get to a point where the stuff that you used to sweat just doesn’t matter. It’s a great place to be.”

Jason Sudeikis, Hathaway’s costar in this month’s Colossal (and a friend since she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2008, when he was a cast member), also answers a vague question about the actress’s evolution by bringing up her husband. “It’s been nice to see her relinquish the constraints of what other people might think and feel about her,” he says. “She’s still talented and kind and hardworking—but her point of view is [no longer] modified by those external forces....She’s got her head on straight.”

Of course, marrying a mensch might not be Hathaway’s sole reason for developing a new, more relaxed take on the vagaries of fame; she hints at another possibility when I share Blunt’s thoughts on her current frame of mind. “That’s the benefit of being invited into a career that’s not a sprint, but a marathon,” Hathaway says. “I think there’s probably...no. I’m not going to say that." She laughs. “Now I watch my words. It’s just,what’s the worst thing that could happen? Probably already happened.”

She could be referring to the so-called Vati-Con scandal of 2008, during which her boyfriend of four years, Raffaello Follieri, was convicted of fraud and money laundering. From a public-opinion standpoint, she emerged from that relatively unscathed,having left the Italian businessman a couple of weeks before his arrest. (The one person who did seem to find fault with Hathaway? Donald Trump, who accused her of being disloyal to a “very nice” guy who’d gotten himself “into a jam.”)

Perhaps more likely, she’s alluding to the #Hathahaters, a collection of non fans that coalesced into...well, some kind of un-ignorable, social media-driven thing in 2012. That November, a blogger at Crushable wrote, “I Don’t Much Care for Anne Hathaway.” Just a day later, she’d returned to the subject, posting “We Can All Agree That Anne Hathaway Is Annoying, Right?” By December,Hathaway complaints had sprouted across the Internet like so many mean-spirited mushrooms. (BuzzFeed helpfully compiled a representative sample: “she thinks she’s “soooooo cool”; she “ruins everything”;she’s “boring.”)

Like all Internet memes, the Hathahate eventually cooled. But even now, four years later, the oft-asked question—posed in think pieces everywhere from the New York Times to Hollywood.com—remains: What, precisely, had Hathaway done to provoke such irritation? Sure, she can be a bit of a ham, willing to burst into song and dance at the drop of the proverbial hat. But so would Jimmy Fallon, Neil Patrick Harris, James Corden, Hugh Jackman, and even Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and they’re beloved for it. (Of course, that’s not the only thing those stars have in common that Hathaway lacks.) And she’d always come across assort of a drama nerd; it wasn’t as though at 30, she’d suddenly undergone a wholesale personality change, or, I don’t know, acquired more incisors.

She’s endured only a few career missteps,including 2009’s rom-com-with-a-mean-streak Bride Wars and 2011’s rom-tragedy One Day, but more bruising was the 2011 Oscars, which she cohosted with James Franco—who, maybe embarrassed by the transparently terrible jokes they’d been given, maintained a heavy-lidded smirk throughout the ceremony,making Hathaway appear almost antic in her game attempts to keep the whole broadcast afloat. Even the most negative reviews of their chemistry-free performance praised her for trying, for doing her job—especially in light of the fact that trying soon came to seem like a criminal offense.

At the same time, Hathaway was starring in back-to-back blockbusters The Dark Knight Rises, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide (President Obama called her Catwoman “the best thing” about the Batman sequel), and the big-screen version of the musical Les Misérables, which made nearly $450 million.

As word spread of the incredible effort Hathaway had put into her much praised and widely awarded turn as Les Miz’s doomed factory worker-turned-prostitute Fantine—a performance that had required her to shave her head, subsist for two weeks on nothing but “two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste” per day, and, of course, to sing her gosh-darned heart out—one thing became very clear: Anne Hathaway was not the detached, world-weary “cool girl” who’d captured the public’s imagination in that year’s best-selling novel Gone Girl.

Hathaway’s every award acceptance speech (she had four big ones) was jumped on by detractors as trying too hard. When she proclaimed that she would “forever-more” use her Golden Globe “as a weapon against self-doubt,” a reporter for the Daily Beast said that she’d just sunk her chances at an Oscar. She won the Oscar anyway—proving that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might not be as repelled by talent, poise, beauty, and hard work as the general blog-writing public.

"Can you imagine going through that?"

“Can you imagine going through that?” asks the singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis,another longtime friend. “It was so cruel,especially when you know someone to be so cool and nice and open and sweet and unpretentious.

Not surprisingly, Hathaway doesn’t exactly jump at the chance to revisit what she’s previously admitted was a rather painful era. “I assumed that this was going to come up,” she says after I broach the subject. “I don’t want to restart the clock on this story. Which is not to say that I feel that this is dead. It’s just, I’ve been asked about it in every interview since, and I don’t have anything else to say.”

She smiles, though, when I tell her that I think it’s officially over: People flocked to her most recent hits, the 2014 sci-fi epic Interstellar, in which she played a scientist/astronaut who sets out with Matthew McConaughey in search of a new planet to inhabit, and 2015’s The Intern, in which she starred as the founder of a fashion start-up. Not to suggest that our culture is now A-OK with outwardly ambitious women—just ask Hillary Clinton. But it does seem that an artist who wants to entertain no longer registers as a major problem. “That would certainly make my life easier,” she says.

Sweater and skirt by Louis Vuitton.

TERRY TSIOLIS

The early responses to Colossal, her loopy, fascinating new movie, in which she plays a dissolute ex-blogger who gets kicked out by her fed-up boyfriend (Dan Stevens) and moves back to her New Hampshire home-town, have likewise been positive, which has to be extra-gratifying given her feeling that it is “in a lot of ways, the most ‘me’ film I’ve ever made,” Hathaway says. “It has that combination of weird and raw and goofy that feels very close to me.” But Hathaway, who’s also one of Colossal’s executive producers, makes it clear that she won’t be taking the peanut gallery’s response to the movie as a referendum on her career, her reliability at the box office, or her choices. She’d specifically set out, she says, in search of something that felt “creatively ambitious” but not necessarily “business ambitious.” And she found it in what at first sounds like typical indie fare—right up until the part where she and an old childhood friend (Sudeikis) discover that, while wasted, she’s intermittently manifesting as a Godzilla-like monster over Seoul.

"In a lot of ways, [it's] the most ‘me’ film I’ve ever made."

Despite the fantastical plot, the film actually explores some very familiar ideas—among them, that addiction ruins lives,and that men can wreak havoc on what feels like a very grand scale in their attempts to gain, or regain, power and control. But not all men, Hathaway insists. She argues that the film is about “toxic entitlement” rather than masculinity per se, even as she concedes that there is often a fair amount of overlap. And while the role itself isn’t a total departure—in a career as long and varied as hers, those are going to be harder and harder to come by—it is a timely reminder of just how good she is. As Colossal’s Spanish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo recalls, “She was really tired the night we were shooting the climactic sequence, and I was terrified that she might not be able to deliver the energy in every take. But whenever she was in front of the camera, it was like early morning for her. Every time I said, ‘Action,’ she woke up so gracefully, and every time I said, ‘Cut,’ she fell asleep again. I was like,Okay, she’s not a person. She’s a cyborg right now.”

"She has a very enduring talent that speaks for itself."

“She’s gifted,” says Gary Ross, the director of Ocean’s Eight. “I don’t think the rest of it matters. She has a very enduring talent that speaks for itself.” And then there’s her much-heralded winsomeness. As Christopher Nolan, the writer and director who cast her in both The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, says, “Anne is a sweet, lovely, genuine person, and a pleasure to work with.”

The explicitly feminist message of Colossal (and even the slightly softer woman-power implications of The Intern before it) points to a new through line in Hathaway’s work. Off screen, too, she’s becoming more political, or, perhaps, returning to her activist roots; at 18, she’d protested President George W. Bush’s inauguration. She’s going to spend the next four years, she tells me, working as a UN Goodwill Ambassador to advocate for paid parental leave in the U.S.“I can’t believe we don’t already have it,” she says. “When Johnny was a week old and I was holding him and I was in the ninth level of ecstasy, I just all of a sudden thought,‘Mommy guilt is invented nonsense.’ We’re encouraged to judge each other, but we should be turning our focus to the people and institutions who should be supporting us and currently aren’t.”

The plot of Ocean’s Eight, due out in June 2018, is still tightly under wraps, but given the combined personal and cultural power of the women involved—her costars include Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Ka-ling, Sarah Paulson, and Rihanna—it’s a safe bet that it will push Hathaway even further down the path she’s on. (The fact that it’s based on one of the most smugly macho capers in recent memory makes its reinvention as a feminist artifact even sweeter, and that Hathaway plays a famous actress speaks volumes about her place in the pantheon as she appears alongside a bunch of other real-life capital-M movie stars.) Ditto for Nasty Women, the just-announced remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which she’ll headline with Rebel Wilson.

Sweater by Louis Vuitton.

Terry Tsiolis

But when I ask Hathaway about her strategy for picking projects—something she’d been open about in the past—she’s circumspect. “I’m not going to run away from a no-brainer,” she says. “But right now, I’m much more into doing things that I find personally fulfilling.” I observe that the most calculated career moves always seem to be the ones that end up backfiring anyway, and she counters: “I think those are just the ones we notice,” she says. “There have probably been some calculated career moves that worked out very well for people, too.”

Female-led remakes are all the rage right now—with Ocean’s Eight being the most high-profile, given its star lineup—but that’s not the only reason Hathaway is attracted to such films. As she says about her experience on Ocean’s, “Hollywood is not a place of equality. I don’t say that with anger or judgment; it’s a statistical fact. And even though I’ve been in some female-centric films, I’ve never been in a film like this. It just kind of makes you aware of the ways you sort of unconsciously change yourself to fit certain scenarios. It’s not better or worse,” she clarifies, “or right or wrong, but there are certain things you understand about one another because of experiences you have in common...it’s probably easy for men to take that for granted. Just being on a set where I’m the one who possesses that ease is really something. It’s a nice alternative narrative.”

Whether it’s one that she sticks to is entirely up to her. “I know what I’m doing with my career, and I know what I can accomplish,” she says. “I’m aware of how unusual it is to be in my position, and I don’t just mean being an actress. I mean the amount of years that I’ve been doing this, the things I’ve been through.” Once Colossal comes and goes, she’ll return to her version of obscurity—only existing, as she jokes, “on HBO”—but she’s clear about one thing: She’ll be back. “Between 2018 and 2021, you’ll get very sick of me,” she promises. “I’ll make sure of it.”

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